down to Matanzas, near which the sugar plantations are in full tide of
operation at this season. A steamer leaves here every night at ten
o'clock, reaching Matanzas before daylight, the distance by sea being
between fifty and sixty miles.
Took this steamer to-night. She got under way punctually at ten o'clock,
and steamed down the harbor. The dark waters are alive with
phosphorescent light. From each ship that lies moored, the cable from
the bows, tautened to its anchor, makes a run of silver light. Each
boat, gliding silently from ship to ship, and shore to shore, turns up a
silver ripple at its stem, and trails a wake of silver behind; while the
dip of the oar-blades brings up liquid silver, dripping, from the opaque
deep. We pass along the side of the two-decker, and see through her
ports the lanterns and men; under the stern of one frigate, and across
the bows of another (for Havana is well supplied with men-of-war); and
drop leisurely down by the Cabaña, where we are hailed from the rocks;
and bend round the Morro, and are out on the salt, rolling sea. Having a
day of work before me, I went early to my berth, and was waked up by the
letting off of steam, in the lower harbor of Matanzas, at three o'clock
in the morning. My fellow-passengers, who sat up, said the little
steamer tore and plunged, and jumped through the water like a thing that
had lost its wits. They seemed to think that the Cuban engineer had got
a machine that would some day run away with him. It was, certainly, a
very short passage.
We passed a good many vessels lying at anchor in the lower harbor of
Matanzas, and came to anchor about a mile from the pier. It was clear,
bright moonlight. The small boats came off to us, and took us and our
luggage ashore. I was landed alone on a quay, carpet-bag in hand, and
had to guess my way to the inn, which was near the water-side. I beat on
the big, close-barred door; and a sleepy Negro, in time, opened it. Mine
host was up, expecting passengers, and after waiting on the very tardy
movements of the Negro, who made a separate journey to the yard for each
thing the room needed, I got to bed by four o'clock, on the usual piece
of canvas stretched over an iron frame, in a room having a brick floor,
and windows without glass closed with big-bolted shutters.
After coffee, walked out to deliver my letters to Mr.----, an American
merchant, who has married the daughter of a planter, a gentleman of
wealth and character. He is much more agreeable and painstaking than we
have any right to expect of one who is served so frequently with notice
that his attentions are desired for the entertainment of a stranger.
Knowing that it is my wish to visit a plantation, he gives me a letter
to Don Juan Chartrand, who has an ingenio (sugar plantation), called La
Ariadne, near Limonar, and about twenty-five miles back in the country
from Matanzas. The train leaves at 2.30 P.M., which gives me several
hours for the city.
Although it is not yet nine o'clock, it is very hot, and one is glad to
keep on the shady side of the broad streets of Matanzas. This city was
built later and more under foreign direction than Havana, and I have
been told, not by persons here however, that for many years the
controlling influences of society were French, English, and American;
but that lately the policy of the government has been to discourage
foreign influence, and now Spanish customs prevail--bull-fights have
been introduced, and other usages and entertainments which had had no
place here before. Whatever may be the reason, this city differs from
Havana in buildings, vehicles, and dress, and in the width of its
streets, and has less of the peculiar air of a tropical city. It has
about 25,000 inhabitants, and stands where two small rivers, the Yumurí
and the San Juan, crossed by handsome stone bridges, run into the sea,
dividing the city into three parts. The vessels lie at anchor from one
to three miles below the city, and lighters, with masts and sails, line
the stone quays of the little rivers. The city is flat and hot, but the
country around is picturesque, hilly, and fertile. To the westward of
the town, rises a ridge, bordering on the sea, called the Cumbre, which
is a place of resort for the beauty of its views; and in front of the
Cumbre, on the inland side, is the deep rich valley of the Yumurí, with
its celebrated cavern. These I must see, if I can, on my return from the
plantation.
In my morning walk, I see a company of coolies, in the hot sun, carrying
stones to build a house, under the eye of a taskmaster who sits in the
shade. The stones have been dropped in a pile, from carts, and the
coolies, carry them, in files, to the cellar of the house. They are
naked to the waist, with short-legged cotton trousers coming to the
knees. Some of these men were strongly, one or two of them powerfully
built, but many seemed very thin and frail. While looking on, I saw an
evident American face near me, and getting into conversation with the
man, found him an intelligent shipmaster from New York, who had lived in
Matanzas for a year or two, engaged in business. He told me, as I had
heard in Havana, that the importer of the coolies gets $400 a head for
them from the purchaser, and that the coolies are entitled from the
purchaser to four dollars a month, which they may demand monthly if they
choose, and are bound to eight years' service, during which time they
may be held to all the service that a slave is subject to. They are more
intelligent, and are put to higher labor than the Negro. He said, too,
it would not do to flog a coolie. Idolaters as they are, they have a
notion of the dignity of the human body, at least as against strangers,
which does not allow them to submit to the indignity of corporal
chastisement. If a coolie is flogged, somebody must die; either the
coolie himself, for they are fearfully given to suicide, or the
perpetrator of the indignity, or some one else, according to their
strange principles of vicarious punishment. Yet such is the value of
labor in Cuba, that a citizen will give $400, in cash, for the chance of
enforcing eight years' labor, at $4 per month, from a man speaking a
strange language, worshipping strange gods or none, thinking suicide a
virtue, and governed by no moral laws in common with his master--his
value being yet further diminished by the chances of natural death, of
sickness, accident, escape, and of forfeiting his services to the
government, for any crime he may commit against laws he does not
understand.
The Plaza is in the usual style--an enclosed garden, with walks; and in
front is the Government House. In this spot, so fair and so still in the
noonday sun, some fourteen years ago, under the fire of the platoons of
Spanish soldiers, fell the patriot and poet, one of the few popular
poets of Cuba, Gabriel de la Concepción Valdez. Charged with being the
head of that concerted movement of the slaves for their freedom which
struck such terror into Cuba, in 1844, he was convicted and ordered to
be shot. At the first volley, as the story is told, he was only wounded.
"Aim here!" said he, pointing to his head. Another volley, and it was
all over.
The name and story of Gabriel de la Concepción Valdez are preserved by
the historians and tourists of Cuba. He is best known, however, by the
name of Placido, that under which he wrote and published, than by his
proper name. He was a man of genius and a man of valor, but--he was a
mulatto!
IX.
TO LIMONAR BY TRAIN
Took the train for Limonar, at 2.30 P.M. There are three classes of
cars, all after the American model, the first of about the condition of
our first-class cars when on the point of being condemned as worn out;
the second, a little plainer; and the third, only covered wagons with
benches. The car I entered had "Davenport & Co., makers, Cambridgeport,
Mass.," familiarly on its front, and the next had "Eaton, Gilbert & Co.,
Troy, N. York." The brakemen on the train are coolies, one of them a
handsome lad, with coarse, black hair, that lay gracefully about his
head, and eyes handsome, though of the Chinese pattern. They were all
dressed in the common shirt, trousers and hat, and, but for their eyes,
might be taken for men of any of the Oriental races.
As we leave Matanzas, we rise on an ascending grade, and the bay and
city lie open before us. The bay is deep on the western shore, under the
ridge of the Cumbre, and there the vessels lie at anchor; while the rest
of the bay is shallow, and its water, in this state of the sky and
light, is of a pale green color. The lighters, with sail and oar are
plying between the quays and the vessels below. All is pretty and quiet
and warm, but the scene has none of those regal points that so impress
themselves on the imagination and memory in the surroundings of Havana.
I am now to get my first view of the interior of Cuba. I could not have
a more favorable day. The air is clear, and not excessively hot. The
soft clouds float midway in the serene sky, the sun shines fair and
bright, and the luxuriance of a perpetual summer covers the face of
nature. These strange palm trees everywhere! I cannot yet feel at home
among them. Many of the other trees are like our own, and though,
tropical in fact, look to the eye as if they might grow as well in New
England as here. But the royal palm looks so intensely and exclusively
tropical! It cannot grow beyond this narrow belt of the earth's surface.
Its long, thin body, so straight and so smooth, swathed from the
foot--in a tight bandage of tawny gray, leaving only its deep-green
neck, and over that its crest and plumage of deep-green leaves! It gives
no shade, and bears no fruit that is valued by men. And it has no beauty
to atone for those wants. Yet it has more than beauty--a strange
fascination over the eye and the fancy, that will never allow it to be
overlooked or forgotten. The palm tree seems a kind of _lusus naturae_
to the northern eye--an exotic wherever you meet it. It seems to be
conscious of its want of usefulness for food or shade, yet has a dignity
of its own, a pride of unmixed blood and royal descent--the hidalgo of
the soil.
What are those groves and clusters of small growth, looking like Indian
corn in a state of transmigration into trees, the stalk turning into a
trunk, a thin soft coating half changed to bark, and the ears of corn
turning into melons? Those are the bananas and plantains, as their
bunches of green and yellow fruits plainly enough indicate, when you
come nearer. But, that sad, weeping tree, its long yellow-green leaves
drooping to the ground! What can that be? It has a green fruit like a
melon. There it is again, in groves! I interrupt my neighbor's tenth
cigarrito, to ask him the name of the tree. It is the cocoa! And that
soft green melon becomes the hard shell we break with a hammer. Other
trees there are, in abundance, of various forms and foliage, but they
might have grown in New England or New York, so far as the eye can teach
us; but the palm, the cocoa, the banana and plantain are the
characteristic trees you could not possibly meet with in any other zone.
Thickets--jungles I might call them--abound. It seems as if a bird could
hardly get through them; yet they are rich with wild flowers of all
forms and colors, the white, the purple, the pink, and the blue. The
trees are full of birds of all plumage. There is one like our brilliant
oriole. I cannot hear their notes, for the clatter of the train. Stone
fences, neatly laid up, run across the lands;--not of our cold
bluish-gray granite, the color, as a friend once said, of a miser's eye,
but of soft, warm brown and russet, and well overgrown with creepers,
and fringed with flowers. There are avenues, and here are clumps of the
prim orange tree, with its dense and deep-green polished foliage
gleaming with golden fruit. Now we come to acres upon acres of the
sugar-cane, looking at a distance like fields of overgrown broomcorn. It
grows to the height of eight or ten feet, and very thick. An army could
be hidden in it. This soil must be deeply and intensely fertile.
There, at the end of an avenue of palms, in a nest of shade-trees, is a
group of white buildings, with a sea of cane-fields about it, with one
high furnace-chimney, pouring out its volume of black smoke. This is a
sugar plantation--my first sight of an ingenio; and the chimney is for
the steam works of the sugar-house. It is the height of the sugar
season, and the untiring engine toils and smokes day and night. Ox
carts, loaded with cane, are moving slowly to the sugar-house from the
fields; and about the house, and in the fields, in various attitudes and
motions of labor, are the Negroes, men and women and children, some
cutting the cane, some loading the carts, and some tending the mill and
the furnace. It is a busy scene of distant industry, in the afternoon
sun of a languid Cuban day.
Now these groups of white one-story buildings become more frequent,
sometimes very near each other, all having the same character--the group
of white buildings, the mill, with its tall furnace-chimney, and the
look of a distillery, and all differing from each other only in the
number and extent of the buildings, or in the ornament and comfort of
shade-trees and avenues about them. Some are approached by broad alleys
of the palm, or mango, or orange, and have gardens around them, and
stand under clusters of shade-trees; while others glitter in the hot
sun, on the flat sea of cane-fields, with only a little oasis of
shade-trees and fruit-trees immediately about the houses.
I now begin to feel that I am in Cuba; in the tropical, rich,
sugar-growing, slave-tilled Cuba. Heretofore, I have seen only the
cities and their environs in which there are more things that are common
to the rest of the world. The country life tells the story of any people
that have a country life. The New England farm-house shows the heart of
New England. The mansion-house and cottage show the heart of Old
England. The plantation life that I am seeing and about to see, tells
the story of Cuba, the Cuba that has been and that is.
As we stop at one station, which seems to be in the middle of a
cane-field, the Negroes and coolies go to the cane, slash off a piece
with their knives, cut off the rind and chew the stick of soft,
saccharine pulp, the juice running out of their mouths as they eat. They
seem to enjoy it so highly, that I am tempted to try the taste of it,
myself. But I shall have time for all this at La Ariadne.
These stations consist merely of one or two buildings, where the produce
of the neighborhood is collected for transportation, and at which there
are very few passengers. The railroad is intended for the carriage of
sugar and other produce, and gets its support almost entirely in that
way; for it runs through a sparse, rural population, where there are no
towns; yet so large and valuable is the sugar crop that I believe the
road is well supported. At each station are its hangers-on of free
Negroes, a few slaves on duty as carriers, a few low whites, and now and
then someone who looks as if he might be an overseer or mayoral of a
plantation.
Limonar appears in large letters on the small building where we next
stop, and I get out and inquire of a squad of idlers for the plantation
of Señor Chartrand. They point to a group of white buildings about a
quarter of a mile distant, standing prettily under high shade-trees, and
approached by an avenue of orange trees. Getting a tall Negro to
shoulder my bag, for a real, I walk to the house. It is an afternoon of
exquisite beauty. How can any one have a weather sensation, in such an
air as this? There is no current of the slightest chill anywhere,
neither is it oppressively hot. The air is serene and pure and light.
The sky gives its mild assurance of settled fair weather. All about me
is rich verdure, over a gently undulating surface of deeply fertile
country, with here and there a high hill in the horizon, and, on one
side, a ridge that may be called mountains. There is no sound but that
of the birds, and in the next tree they may be counted by hundreds. Wild
flowers, of all colors and scents, cover the ground and the thickets.
This is the famous red earth, too. The avenue looks as if it had been
laid down with pulverized brick, and all the dust on any object you see
is red. Now we turn into the straight avenue of orange trees--prim, deep
green trees, glittering with golden fruit. Here is the one-story,
high-roofed house, with long, high piazzas. There is a high wall,
carefully whitewashed, enclosing a square with one gate, looking like a
garrisoned spot. That must be the Negroes' quarters; for there is a
group of little Negroes at the gate, looking earnestly at the
approaching stranger. Beyond is the sugar-house, and the smoking
chimney, and the ox carts, and the field hands. Through the wide, open
door of the mansion, I see two gentlemen at dinner, an older and a
younger--the head of gray, and the head of black, and two Negro women,
one serving, and the other swinging her brush to disperse the flies. Two
big, deep-mouthed hounds come out and bark; and the younger gentleman
looks at us, comes out, and calls off the dogs. My Negro stops at the
path and touches his hat, waiting permission to go to the piazza with
the luggage; for Negroes do not go to the house door without previous
leave, in strictly ordered plantations. I deliver my letter, and in a
moment am received with such cordial welcome that I am made to feel as
if I had conferred a favor by coming to see them.
X.
A SUGAR PLANTATION: The Labor
At some seasons, a visit may be a favor, on remote plantations; but I
know this is the height of the sugar season, when every hour is precious
to the master. After a brief toilet, I sit down with them; for they have
just begun dinner. In five minutes, I am led to feel as if I were a
friend of many years. Both gentlemen speak English like a native tongue.
To the younger it is so, for he was born in South Carolina, and his
mother is a lady of that state. The family are not here. They do not
live on the plantation, but in Matanzas. The plantation is managed by
the son, who resides upon it; the father coming out occasionally for a
few days, as now, in the busy season.
The dinner is in the Spanish style, which I am getting attached to. I
should flee from a joint, or a sirloin. We have rice, excellently
cooked, as always in Cuba, eggs with it, if we choose, and fried
plantains, sweet potatoes, mixed dishes of fowl and vegetables, with a
good deal of oil and seasoning, in which a hot red pepper, about the
size of the barberry, prevails. Catalonia wine, which is pretty sure to
be pure, is their table claret, while sherry, which also comes direct
from the mother-country, is for dessert. I have taken them by surprise,
in the midst of the busiest season, in a house where there are no
ladies; yet the table, the service, the dress and the etiquette, are
none the less in the style of good society. There seems to be no letting
down, where letting down would be so natural and excusable.
I suppose the fact that the land and the agricultural capital of the
interior are in the hands of an upper class, which does no manual labor,
and which has enough of wealth and leisure to secure the advantages of
continued intercourse with city and foreign society, and of occasional
foreign travel, tends to preserve throughout the remote agricultural
districts, habits and tone and etiquette, which otherwise would die out,
in the entire absence of large towns and of high local influences.
Whoever has met with a book called "Evenings in Boston," and read the
story of the old Negro, Saturday, and seen the frontispiece of the Negro
fleeing through the woods of Santo Domingo, with two little white boys,
one in each hand, will know as much of Mr. Chartrand, the elder, as I
did the day before seeing him. He is the living hero, or rather subject,
for Saturday was the hero, of that tale. His father was a wealthy
planter of Santo Domingo, a Frenchman, of large estates, with wife,
children, friends and neighbors. These were gathered about him in a
social circle in his house, when the dreadful insurrection overtook
them, and father, mother, sons, and daughters were murdered in one
night, and only two of the children, boys of eight and ten, were saved
by the fidelity of Saturday, an old and devoted house servant. Saturday
concealed the boys, got them off the island, took them to Charleston,
South Carolina, where they found friends among the Huguenot families,
and the refugees from Santo Domingo. There Mr. Chartrand grew up; and
after a checkered and adventurous early life, a large part of it on the
sea, he married a lady of worth and culture, in South Carolina, and
settled himself as a planter, on this spot, nearly forty years ago. His
plantation he named "El Laberinto," (The Labyrinth,) after a favorite
vessel he had commanded, and for thirty years it was a prosperous
cafetal, the home of a happy family, and much visited by strangers from.
America and Europe. The causes which broke up the coffee estates of Cuba
carried this with the others; and it was converted into a sugar
plantation, under the new name of La Ariadne, from the fancy of Ariadne
having shown the way out of the Labyrinth. Like most of the sugar
estates, it is no longer the regular home of its proprietors.
The change from coffee plantations to sugar plantations--from the
cafetal to the ingenio, has seriously affected the social, as it has
the economic condition of Cuba.
Coffee must grow under shade. Consequently the coffee estate was, in the
first place, a plantation of trees, and by the hundred acres. Economy
and taste led the planters, who were chiefly the French refugees from
Santo Domingo to select fruit trees, and trees valuable for their wood,
as well as pleasing for their beauty and shade. Under these plantations
of trees, grew the coffee plant, an evergreen, and almost an
ever-flowering plant, with berries of changing hues, and, twice a year,
brought its fruit to maturity. That the coffee might be tended and
gathered, avenues wide enough for wagons must be carried through the
plantations, at frequent intervals. The plantation was, therefore, laid
out like a garden, with avenues and foot-paths, all under the shade of
the finest trees, and the spaces between the avenues were groves of
fruit trees and shade trees, under which grew, trimmed down to the
height of five or six feet, the coffee plant. The labor of the
plantation was in tending, picking, drying, and shelling the coffee, and
gathering the fresh fruits of trees for use and for the market, and for
preserves and sweetmeats, and in raising vegetables and poultry, and
rearing sheep and horned cattle and horses. It was a beautiful and
simple horticulture, on a very large scale. Time was required to perfect
this garden--the Cubans call it paradise--of a cafetal; but when
matured, it was a cherished home. It required and admitted of no
extraordinary mechanical power, or of the application of steam, or of
science, beyond the knowledge of soils, of simple culture, and of plants
and trees.
For twenty years and more it has been forced upon the knowledge of the
reluctant Cubans, that Brazil, the West India islands to the southward
of Cuba, and the Spanish Main, can excel them in coffee-raising. The
successive disastrous hurricanes of 1843 and 1845, which destroyed many
and damaged most of the coffee estates, added to the colonial system of
the mother-country, which did not give extraordinary protection to this
product, are commonly said to have put an end to the coffee
plantations. Probably, they only hastened a change which must at some
time have come. But the same causes of soil and climate which made Cuba
inferior in coffee-growing, gave her a marked superiority in the
cultivation of sugar. The damaged plantations were not restored as
coffee estates, but were laid down to the sugar-cane; and gradually,
first in the western and northern parts, and daily extending easterly
and southerly over the entire island, the exquisite cafetals have been
prostrated and dismantled, the groves of shade and fruit trees cut down,
the avenues and foot-paths ploughed up, and the denuded land laid down
to wastes of sugar-cane.